The conventional way of dealing with a hot potato is to pass it on as soon as possible. The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has chosen a more painful course in his handling of the News Corp bid to take 100% control of BSkyB: he has chosen to hold on to the hot potato for quite a long time – longer than he either needs to or, indeed, should. He thereby invites questions about his motives and provokes still more questions about what he imagines could happen next that could possibly have been better than doing what he was advised to do.

The advice from Ofcom was pretty clear – that Hunt should refer the bid to the Competition Commission for deeper consideration of the serious plurality issues in creating a huge unified media company, boosting its share of news consumption from 14% to 24%. Ofcom is a serious, neutral regulator. It has made a straightforward recommendation, which Hunt says he is minded to accept. But, instead of doing so he wants to bend over backwards to give News Corp one last chance to see if it wishes to propose any undertakings which might mitigate Ofcom's perfectly reasonable anxieties.

Why? The former Independent editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, wrote yesterday about the "odious" unwritten rule that has governed politics in this country for the best part of 40 years: "Never offend the Murdochs." Could it really be that simple? There will be many who will believe it, particularly after learning of the extremely ill-judged Christmas social contacts between News Corp executives and the prime minister. More benign observers will argue that Hunt is simply going the extra mile to lower the chances that the Rottweiler tendency within the Murdoch camp will succeed in judicially reviewing the process.

But what undertakings could possibly satisfy Ofcom or the Office of Fair Trading, which has also been drawn into the decision? Alarm bells ought to start pealing out if we begin to hear proposals for some form of independent editorial guarantees. There are a number of distinguished former editors, including Harry Evans and Andrew Neil, who should be called as witnesses to the worth of such promises. Or read the book just published in Australia by another veteran News Corp editor, Bruce Guthrie. He said recently: "At News Limited, the almost instinctive reaction to everything is 'What will Rupert think?' It doesn't matter whether you're an editor, or a commercial manager or a section head; you put the news through this kind of filter. What will Rupert think? What will the Murdoch family think? What will the corporate partners think? Is this in the business interest?" The book is called Man Bites Murdoch.